A 2010 plane crash in the Congo that killed 20 people may have been caused by passengers surging toward the flight deck to get away from an escaped crocodile, causing the plane to stall, a UK coroner’s court heard Friday.

The deadly incident occurred four years ago, on August 25, 2010,
when the plane was en route from Kinshasa to Bandundu and crashed
1 kilometer short of the runway, killing all three crew members
and 17 passengers. There was one survivor who became a crucial
witness.

The aircraft was piloted by 62-year-old Belgian Danny Philemotte,
who also owned the airline, and co-piloted by 39-year old first
officer Chris Wilson from Cheltenham, England.

Wilson died instantly alongside his fellow pilot. No cause for
the crash has been officially established so far, but local media
almost instantly started circulating the version that one of the
passengers had taken a crocodile onto the plane to sell it.

On Friday an inquest into the British citizen’s death taking
place in the UK city of Gloucester heard that the plane nosedived
as panicking passengers stampeded in the cabin after the
crocodile managed to gnash its way out of a bag. The reptile also
apparently survived, according to the only surviving human
eyewitness.

Timothy Atkinson, an air crash investigator working on the case,
said he could not come to any definitive conclusions because the
Congolese authorities had not given him the black box flight
recorder.

“The most likely explanation I can find is that the aircraft
stalled, or was in a spin prior to impact, which may have been
from a variety of causes. Essentially, it fell out of the
sky,” he said.

The coroner at the inquest, David Dooley, said he was presented
with a number of possible causes, including fuel shortage,
overloading, engine failure, pilot error, poor maintenance and
sabotage.

“Problems with direct witnesses and problems with the black
box have only resulted in vague guesses as to what happened with
this crash. All we have are possibilities rather than
probabilities,” Dooley said.

Dooley read out an email from Chris’s father, Rob, to Congolese
officials. Rob said that he had spoken to the original
investigator who said, “There was a gentleman who came up
with a story about a crocodile. There is apparently a video of
the crocodile being taken out of the plane,” he said.

However, it appears the crocodile did get its comeuppance – after
the crash it was apparently killed with a machete.

Wilson had ditched his job as a cabin crew member with a British
airline and moved to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to
follow his dream of becoming a pilot.

He joined the Congolese company Filair to clock up the 1,000
hours needed to get a commercial pilot’s license.

But Wilson told his brother Martin that the airline was
unreliable to the point of being dangerous and his Belgian
copilot, Philemotte, was so incompetent that Chris had no idea
how he was flying at all. Matters were made worse by the fact
that Philemotte also owned the airline.

Chris also said that it was normal for passengers to walk around
and stand up when they were meant to be sitting down, making the
plane unstable.

It was also the norm for passengers to take animals on board, as
if it was a taxi and not an aircraft.

The Czech-built Let 410 had been flying from the capital Kinshasa
to Bandundu when it crashed into a house less than 1 kilometer
from the runway.